Song for the sneckless

One of the previous commenters had asked about some details on snecking blades. The sneck is a very nice addition to a blade, particularly on low angle miter planes, as it provides a very handy means for reducing blade projection without having to strike the plane body itself.

The method I use to sneck miter blades is simple: just add a supplementary thickness of steel at the rear of the blade. It’s a very easy process, but it’s a nice introduction to peining and rivets, which are critical to constructing dovetailed infill planes.

Here’s the annealed O1 stock I’m going to use for the blade.

This is 1″ wide, 3/16″ stock, and I’ll cut another section of steel the same width, about an inch long, to use as the sneck – in this case I’m using 1/8″ for the sneck, but you can use a thicker sneck if you prefer. The mating faces of both pieces of steel should be nice and flat to ensure you get a clean union between the two – the goal is for the blade to look like a single chunk of steel at the end. I lap both pieces on a granite surface plate to about 220 grit.

Next, drill the holes for your rivets. I’m actually prepping four snecks here, as I want to make a few spare blades. Two pins are more than adequate for a steel union of this size – I’m drilling to 3/16″, and I’ll pin with O1 drill rod of the same size.

Make sure you use the sneck itself to register the holes in the blade, and drill those as well. On the top of the sneck and the bottom (face) of the blade, you want to taper the holes just slightly to give the peined rivets someplace to ‘grab’ and join the steel tightly. I use a tapered hand reamer – they are readily available from most industrial supply houses. Here’s a shot of tapering the sneck:

Once all for tapers have been reamed, cut your pin stock – leave about 1/16″ extra length for peining – and assemble the bits and pieces together for peining. Here is the assembly before peining the rivets… note that my ‘fitting’ is hardly precise – but it’s completely acceptable for my needs as I’ve left myself plenty of extra material for filing and grinding off during final shaping :

I forgot to shoot pics of the actual peining, but it consists of striking the pins numerous times (several dozen strikes on each side of each pin) forcing the excess material into the reamed tapers. Peining is far from difficult, but it does require a little finesse to strike hard enough to move the metal, but not hard enough to deform the parts you don’t want to deform, or introduce unnecessary stresses. My advice would be to always err on the side of ‘too soft’ as I’ve yet to see anyone who didn’t start out striking much harder than necessary. When it comes time to pein the shell of the next miter plane, I’ll try to get into some more detail on the techniques you can use, but for simple rivets like these, it’s mainly just a matter of aim.

Once completed, it should look something like this (I’ve done some rough shaping already in this photo):

Make sure you’ve completely filled the tapers filed into the rivet holes so you don’t have gaps after cleaning up, and be careful not to dent the surrounding metal if you can help it – it will make the lapping much easier if you don’t have to remove a few thou of surface to remove the dents.

Now it’s a simple matter of grinding and lapping the assembly to its final form. I do the majority of stock removal with files and a 12″ disc sander, and then lap to the desired sheen — in this case, only up to 180 grit, as I like to leave some texture on the blades.

Here is the blade after shaping, ready for heat treating:

And that’s all there is to it.&nbs
p; Start to finish, including cutting the blade stock, I’d say this took about two to three hours to do a batch of four blades to the point of having them ready to heat treat. A single blade would probably be do-able in an hour or less once you get used to the process.

Please bear in mind that there is no reason you can’t add a sneck to a blade after heat treating, but the hardened blade makes drilling and shaping much more difficult. However, an annealed sneck on a hardened blade is not an issue at all in my experience.

Finally, here’s a shot of the blade after heat treating, in place in a small miter plane. Also pictured is the coffin smoother (with the older LC screw) I briefly showed in a previous post, which someone else asked to more photography of.

Hope that helps with the basics of snecking. I’ll be posting the first sequence of prepping the Towell miter plane later in the week.

Basically all O1 flat stock is sold in its annealed state. I have bought O1 from a number of sources – including Enco (use-enco.com), McMaster-Carr (www.mcmaster.com), and a few ebay sellers as well. I have also heard good things about Victor Machinery in Brooklyn (www.victornet.com). My experience is that they're all selling the same steel, so choose v-based on whatever works best for you in terms of pricing, shipping, and service. In many areas McMaster-Carr ships within 24 hours (or even same=day) by UPS — a very nice thing.

I don't find it to be a problem, but you do need to pay attention to be sure you don't catch the wedge when striking the sneck. When using the sneck, though, I use a very short 'swing' – just a tap – and it's not a problem until the blade gets significantly shorter than it is now. The blades do have a much shorter usable 'life' than most bench planes, but since the blades are easy to make I am not really concerned about it.

Using a sneck on the bottom is a good solution, but I wonder whether the vertical force when you strike the blade would put too much stress on the wedge where it enters the bridge. I suppose this might be an 'imaginary' issue as well, though – I'll have to try one of those on a blade.

Very nice tidy tutorial, Raney. I would've guessed (incorrectly) they were the product of grinding, and would've been unlikley to try it because of that.

I'll be interested in seeing if and what you post about heat treating, and if you have any tips above and beyond tempilstiks and/or heating until carbon migration starts and then quenching.

Any thoughts on what you use for an iron? Is it decarb free or just precision ground? I have had decent luck with decarb free thus far, which is limited to just a few blades, and no torture tests to speak of, but out of fear stashed away a can of kasenit from McMaster per a comment on woodnet about its usefulness.

David – I'm hesitant to write much about heat treating, as there are already several sources of information on the subject available online – most of them much more knowledgeable than I am on the subject. As for your questions, though – I've had good luck with 'regular' precision-ground O1, and a speedy hand at quenching when I've hit the desired temperature. I am actually in the process of setting up a very small 'oven' of sorts to aid in getting more consistent temperatures, and hopefully a slightly more o2-starved environment. Both Craig D at Zenkinetic, and Ron Hock have blogged a bit about coatings that can be applied to help prevent carbon-loss when heat-treating, but I haven't tried these yet. I plan to try them soon, though…